China Strike Read online

  Feng elbowed Wyatt’s arm and winked. He took out his cell phone and scuttled to the side of the two protesters. He spoke in a voice loud enough for Wyatt to hear and in a faintly ridiculous caricature of a Chinese accent: “Hey, guys, hey. I like the placard.”

  The two protesters stared at Feng’s blue suit and red tie with hostility. He wasn’t put off. He followed them through the ticket turnstile, sliding around the barrier without paying.

  “You have to buy a ticket,” the girl said in Austrian-accented English.

  Wyatt smiled. Just because you have a pin through your tongue doesn’t mean you’ve quit the middle class and all its rules of good behavior.

  Feng laughed and got between the two people. He led them to the end of the train platform. “Can you take a picture of me with your placard? I think it’s a cool protest, man.”

  The girl held the placard up, examining it. “Yeah, Bernd worked hard on it. It was his idea.”

  “Then get a picture of me and Bernd with your cool poster, baby.”

  Feng handed her his phone. She didn’t like being called baby, but she raised the phone to take a shot anyway. Feng got in close to the placard with Bernd on the other side. She took the snap.

  “Now with you. What’s your name?”

  “Silvia.”

  “Silvia what?”

  “Weiss.”

  “Beautiful name, Silvia Weiss. What is the name of your father?”

  “My father? Gerhard. Why do you want—?”

  “I’m Randy. That’s not my real name. All North Koreans take a Western name when they travel. Our own names are too difficult for Westerners to say.”

  Wyatt waited behind the barrier, wondering what this was all about. The train rattled along the tunnel, nearing the station. The commuters and protesters leaned forward to watch its approach.

  “You’re from North Korea?” Her voice was awed and yet suspicious as she posed for the photo.

  “Workers’ paradise.” Feng took his phone back. He shook hands with Bernd and held onto his pale wrist. “You guys are the best. You give me hope for the West.”

  The train burst out of the tunnel into the station no more than ten yards from Feng and the two Austrians. Feng yanked hard on Bernd’s hand and swung the young man out onto the track. The train screeched into him, the brakes squealing louder even than the girl. Feng punched her hard in the face. She fell to the ground.

  Feng skipped through the turnstile and went past Wyatt. “Clean it up,” he said. He went along the tunnel, back toward the Hotel Sacher.

  On the platform people screamed. Some gathered around the prone girl. She lifted herself onto her elbows, leaking blood from her nose. Bystanders stared about them, looking for the perpetrator, wondering if they had been deceived in what they thought they had seen. A pair of policemen hurried along the platform. One of them knelt beside the girl.

  Wyatt’s cell phone buzzed. He took it out of his pocket and glanced at the screen. A text from Feng. He opened it up. It was the picture of the young Austrian man and Feng with the faces obscured by the kind of dumb filters high schoolers slapped onto photos in Snapchat. The Austrian guy had a Mickey Mouse face. Feng had a halo. On the placard the features of Dick Bruce were replaced with the head of the devil. Wyatt spun toward the tunnel. Feng knew. Knew that Wyatt was working for the US commerce secretary. What else did he know? He had pasted the devil over Bruce’s face. Wyatt thought, I guess he knows almost all there is to know.

  CHAPTER 19

  Saskia Hütz made coffee in a battered steel macchinetta on the gas stove. Verrazzano washed out the cups and stood them in the drying rack. He was eager to settle Hütz and her son here in her friend’s cabin and head on to his next lead—Roula Haddad had texted that she’d have him on the move within minutes. It was hard to wait even that long. In the quiet kitchen, he was troubled by the extent of the threats he faced. Wyatt, Tom Frisch, even Turbo’s boss, Feng Yi, they were all out there. At the root of his misgivings, however, was something or someone hidden that he could only sense right now, an unnamed peril. Tension made a tight band across his brow. The coffeepot boiled.

  “Maybe caffeine will help?” Saskia Hütz pointed at Verrazzano’s knitted forehead and gestured with a coffee cup. “My father called it thinking juice.”

  “I sure do need to think fast.”

  “My friend hasn’t used this place for a few months.” Hütz poured two cups. “Everything is a little dusty and dirty. I must apologize.”

  “We appreciate having a place to bring you and your son. Somewhere safe.”

  “It’s hard to imagine we will ever be safe again.”

  “You don’t have to imagine it. I’ll make it happen.”

  His phone buzzed. Another text from Haddad in New York. It read: “Feng Yi at trade talks in Vienna.” The Chinese cyber chief. The one Turbo said plotted the big car crash. The man who employed Wyatt to get it done and couldn’t control him when China decided not to go ahead.

  Hütz set down Verrazzano’s coffee before him. She glanced through the kitchen door to the living room. Jahn was on the couch thumbing through cell phone messages. “Why do you do this?” Hütz sat across the table from him.

  Verrazzano slipped his phone into his shirt pocket and let his eyes drop to the surface of the black coffee in his cup. His fingers played through the intro to an old Mose Allison tune, “The Seventh Son,” soothing him with the silent music each motion signaled to his brain.

  “Are you a seventh son?” Hütz gave him a saucy twist of her lips. “I’m a piano player too. I can read your fingers. It also happens to be one of my favorite songs. Can you ‘heal the sick, raise the dead’?”

  “That’s just the words of the song. When I’m around, the sick feel sicker and the dead stay dead.”

  Her laugh reminded him of the low notes of the song, way down in the left hand, where Mose made them felt, rather than heard. “Who taught you to play?”

  “My mom.”

  “And you try to tell me that you’re not thinking about your family? Men are so easy to see through. I’m lucky I have a son. I will always know what he’s thinking, even before he does. Women are harder to figure out. Tell me about your mother.”

  He shook his head. “I have a lot to do right now. A lot to think about.”

  “You need to rest, give your brain a few moments to recharge. If you won’t sleep, you can at least talk about something good.”

  “What makes you think talking about my mom is good?”

  “You use the music to find some calm. That’s obvious. She is a source of happiness to you.”

  “Was.”

  “But she still is where you find your happiness. No?”

  He blinked slowly. He pictured her, Donna Verrazzano, singing the old jazz standards she loved, as her teenaged son accompanied her on the piano. Then he imagined her face in the headlights of the BMW that killed her on her way home from her night shift in the cancer ward. “She still is.”

  “But not the rest of your family?”

  “I’m pretty close with my sister. My brother’s dead.”

  “You don’t mention your father.”

  Robert Verrazzano wasn’t much of a father after Donna’s death. He couldn’t help his eldest son with his drug habit or keep his daughter from moving out to live with her boyfriend when she was sixteen. He’d been sullen and drunk, and he’d sold the piano his youngest boy Dominic played so well, wanting the last two people in the house to sit in silence with the ghost of the woman they both loved more than life. “My father and I didn’t get along,” Verrazzano said.

  “That’s a big problem. I think about it often with my little boy. He was born with donated sperm. He will never know his father. I must make sure that this doesn’t fill him with rage and that he doesn’t spend his life looking for a father figure and choosing the wrong one for lack of a true model when he was young.”

  Verrazzano laughed quietly.

  “You’re laughing becaus
e you think I talk too formally? It’s just that it’s a foreign language,” Hütz said. “It’s hard for me to sound natural in English. But it’s true all the same.”

  He shook his head and laughed a little louder. “It’s not that, at all. We go through life thinking we’re all so unique. No one could possibly understand us. Then someone you’ve known for about four hours lays it out there for you, and they’re right on the money.”

  “On the money? What does that mean?”

  “I’m laughing because you’ve seen right through me.”

  “I’m flattered. Father figures. That has been your issue, then.”

  “My issue, yeah.” He sensed a complete lack of need from Hütz. Like most men, he found need irresistibly attractive, but Hütz didn’t prompt the desire to protect and care for a woman that was often so strong in him. Then he thought of Jahn. It was an involuntary switch in his attention, and he saw that the moments of confusion he had felt around the FBI agent were fed by a sexual attraction.

  “You are going to have to kill your father figure.”

  He looked up at Hütz sharply. His phone buzzed in his pocket.

  “In a psychological sense,” she added.

  He brought the phone to his ear. “Hi, Roula.”

  “Are you alone? Can you talk?”

  The urgency in Haddad’s voice brought Verrazzano to his feet. He went into the living room. Jahn glanced up at him from her phone. Verrazzano went over to the window. A wood fire crackled in the hearth. “What’ve you got?”

  “A lead on the money trail that might just take us to the last Chinese engineer.”

  “Great. Let’s hear it.”

  “Noelle followed the Luxembourg lead. The private banker there was more than a little crooked. The Luxembourg account is held in the name of a Syrian government official named Nabil Allaf. The account was used to set up a bunch of short positions in auto stocks. In fact, the stocks of almost every major car company.”

  “Does that include Darien?”

  “It does, and after the Darien crash, the position was closed out with a five-million-dollar profit.”

  “Did that money go back to the Luxembourg account?”

  “It went to the same private bank in Luxembourg. But to a different account. In the name of a US national. Lawton Wyatt.”

  Verrazzano stared out into the stormy night.

  “You hear me?”

  “Go on,” he murmured.

  “I’ll try to check out what we have on Wyatt. Maybe the bad guys didn’t expect the Darien crash. They set up this second account in a hurry, and they didn’t have a plan to launder the profits right away. The only movement has been a payment that went out yesterday to a Bitcoin address.”

  Something moved in the bushes beyond the lawn. Verrazzano watched, but he saw nothing. “A Bitcoin address. Did you track it?”

  “Noelle got details from the banker in Luxembourg, so I’ve been able to narrow it down. The account holder has received Bitcoins from other sources in the last year. Each time they convert the Bitcoin to actual cash at the same place.”

  “Because you can’t spend the Bitcoins.”

  “Right, they’re just ones and zeroes on your phone, until you actually go to a dealer who’s willing to give you cash for them.”

  “Who’s the account holder?”

  “It’s a woman named Jin Ju. Known as Julie.”

  Ju. The name Turbo had mentioned. The last surviving Chinese engineer. It was the right lead. “What do we know about her?”

  “Married to a Czech guy. She’s a computer engineer. Lives in Prague.”

  “It’s her. The last engineer. Get the Czech police to pick her up.”

  “I already sent them. They found her husband at home. He doesn’t know where she is, and he was apparently not happy to find that the police consider her some kind of criminal. He won’t tell them anything else.”

  “We’re talking about his wife’s life here.”

  “He’s an old Communist. I gather he doesn’t trust the police now that the Czech Republic has gone full-on capitalist.”

  “Like he hasn’t had long enough to get over that? Then we have to follow the money. The place where Jin Ju converts the Bitcoin—what’s the address?”

  “It’s a small loan company in a central neighborhood of Prague.”

  “Send it to my phone. I’ll go there right away.”

  “That’s it? You’re going to stake the place out until someone goes in who looks like a lady Chinese computer engineer?”

  He smiled at the slight note of derision in her voice. “It’s a pretty cunning plan, right?”

  She sighed. “I guess it’s all we’ve got.”

  Jahn turned toward the window and caught his eye. She dropped her glance back to her phone.

  “What’s Noelle and Bill’s next step?” he said.

  “Bill’s going to shadow the Irish banker in Luxembourg. See if he can pick anything else up,” Haddad said. “Noelle is backing him up.”

  “Good. Keep me posted on the banker. I’m going to head for Prague.”

  “You got it.”

  He hung up. Jahn put away her phone too. “Prague?”

  “Quite the European tour, isn’t it?”

  She stood and walked toward him. “Yeah, it’s real romantic.”

  They shared a quiet smile. He thought of the need he sensed in her. He wanted to protect her, to tend to someone he could see had been wounded.

  “What happened, Gina?” he whispered.

  She flinched and touched her fingers to her scarred cheek.

  “I don’t mean your face,” he said. “I mean, why are you scared?”

  “Who says I am?”

  “I’ve got a sense for it. Scary guys often do.”

  She was still, her features oscillating between calculation and vulnerability. Then she said, “I don’t want you to end up like my husband.”

  “I’m not going to die.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, then caught herself. She changed the shape of the word that was forming on her lips. “Sometimes I think love is what you feel toward something you’d die for. Chris loved Delta Force, and I think he loved me. But if he was going to die, we both knew it’d be for Delta Force. He disappeared in Syria. His commanding officer told me there were reports he’d been transported to Lebanon. Held by the Islamic State or Hezbollah. Either way, gone forever.”

  “Is that official?”

  She pushed her hair away from her face. The light from the wood fire danced across the scars on her cheek. “Let’s go to Prague. It’s a long drive. We can talk in the car.”

  “I’m going to Prague alone. I want you to go to Vienna.” He saw the protest on her face and so he made his voice hard. “Feng Yi is there. Turbo said he was in charge of this whole thing. I need you to get a hold of him.”

  “No way. I’m staying with you.”

  “I have to head for Prague right now. You wait here until our ICE guys arrive from Berlin. They’ll make sure Saskia and the kid are safe. As soon as that’s squared away, go to Vienna. Roula Haddad will give you Feng Yi’s location.”

  “Dominic, that’s not—”

  “That’s not negotiable. It’s how it has to be.” He picked up on some energy twitching through her, something that seemed to take all her strength to repress, glowing within her, radioactive. He started to turn away from her.

  “It was my first husband.” Her words came out softly, but with enough force to stop him. “A sweet guy, when he didn’t drink. He cut up my face with a bottle. Then he went out, drove his car into a tree, and died. If he hadn’t have done that, I’d still be married to him. I just couldn’t get away from him, no matter what he did or said. After that I never thought anyone would look at me, let alone love me.”

  She touched the scars. “When Chris came along, I used to talk about getting plastic surgery, but he told me, ‘There’s no one like you, Gina. Don’t ever change.’ I’ll always love that man. I’l
l do anything for him. That’s the only thing that has to be.”

  Verrazzano would have told her about Melanie right then. Told her he was waiting for his wife even though the life he had lead with Wyatt made him repulsive to her. But an impulse arose in some recess of his brain where pain and anger went to stew, and it kept his lips tight and his jaw tensed. “I still need you to go to Vienna.”

  “I know.” She turned to the window.

  “Find Feng Yi. Watch him, and be ready. We might need to put him out of action.”

  She was motionless and silent.

  Verrazzano went out into the kitchen. “Saskia, I’m going to be on my way. Agent Jahn will wait with you until further protection arrives.”

  “Stay safe, Dominic.”

  “That’s your job. If I intended to stay safe, I’d—”

  She cocked her head, quizzically.

  He stopped short and started again, “I guess I just wouldn’t know how.”

  He went out of the back door and across the soft grass toward the edge of the lawn where it fringed the forest. The car was in the drive. Jahn watched him from the window of the living room. He waved. She went to the fireplace and sat down with her back to him.

  He opened the driver’s side door of the car. His phone vibrated. He thumbed through the passcode and opened the message. Haddad sent him the address of the loan office in Prague where Julie Jin cashed in her Bitcoins. He put the phone in his pocket and shifted his weight to slide into the front seat of the car.

  He heard a single footstep on the gravel behind him, then an arm no less yielding than an iron bar swung around his neck and clamped tight. The bicep of his attacker pressed against the artery on the right of his neck, the forearm cut off the flow of blood down the other side. A sleeper hold. Verrazzano tried to throw the assailant. He lifted his feet onto the car’s doorframe and kicked back. Both men went down on the gravel, but the sleeper hold wouldn’t break.